[chancho]

What exactly does "viable" mean in this context? Because the husband and wife team behind NameVoyager have had the baby name trend visualization market cornered for years now.

http://www.babynamewizard.com/voyager#

They aren't just using it to drive ad traffic and promote the book, but are now (since I last looked) actually charging for the visualizations themselves. And presumably people are paying, but who knows...

On the plus side, this means there's a market, but you've got a long way to go to catch them, both in regards to the visualizations and the breadth of the name database. It's a good start, though.

[phuff]

Yeah, viable in this context means that you can graph names and there are ads on the page. All the times we've tried to look at names for popularity when naming our kids we haven't had just simple visualization tools like this, so I thought I'd build one.

Then after I started I saw those guys but saw that you have to pay to visualize it, so I thought "hey, I'll disrupt them " :)

[xyzzyb]

Of course there's always Wolfram|Alpha.

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=David%2C+John

[Papirola]

you keep using "disrupt"; I do not think it means what you think it means

[steve8918]

Not to be too harsh, but I agree, this is hardly a "viable" product. It pretty much is a college-level assignment where you just graph data in a database. It's needs a lot more work before it becomes minimally "viable".

Why make people guess the names? Every name I picked seems to drop down dramatically, but if I want to find the most popular names, I have to guess it? Why not show the top 10 most popular names?

What about a logarithmic graph? If you graph "Isabella" or "David" next to any name, it renders the graph useless.